For a personal reason I’ll tell you about in a moment, I really do believe that
the best strategy for moral self-development is employing the vocabulary of
the virtues and vices. But teaching a third year undergraduate course on the
Nic Eth (with a crash intro on modern VE) for the last ten years, and reading a
paper of Sophia Vasalou’s generated in me a worry about implementing this
strategy, and currently I am rather gloomily thinking that teaching the
vocabulary quite young is going to be essential. So I’m going to tell you about
that and see if you share my worry and hope you have some suggestions about
how to meet it.
The personal reason is, in general terms, probably the reason almost everyone
has for thinking they have found the road to human salvation – I had an
epiphany.
I was, in my latish twenties, in the second or third year of my first teaching job
in one of the Oxford colleges, quite an achievement for a simple colonial girl.
But the achievement had come at some cost. Having battled the extreme
sexism and philistinism of NZ in the 60s to get as far as Oxford, I then found
myself having to fight not philistinism but snobbery and an even more extreme
sexism. So I had been fighting for almost ten years and the result was that I
had undone quite a bit of the excellent ethical upbringing my parents had
given me. I was still good at friendship and loyalty, but beyond my circle of
friends I had made myself intolerant, aggressive, and cruelly sharp-tongued.
I was not, at that time, interested in ethics though of course I had been going
to Philippa Foot’s classes and of course I taught it in college –mostly
utilitarianism and Hare and so on. And indeed, Foot’s Moral Beliefs –but
somehow I didn’t think of any of it as actually engaging with my life, any more
than I thought about all the prevalent sense-data stuff and the problem of our
knowledge of the external world – which I also taught - as engaging with my
life.
And then one day, in preparation for a tutorial, I was re-reading Moral Beliefs
for the nth time and for the nth time reread the very eudaimonist bit near the
end where she’s defending the idea that justice is more profitable than
injustice … and Alakazam! the scales fell from my eyes. ‘What am I doing?’ I
thought. (I meant ‘doing with myself/my life.’) ‘I don’t want to be tough. I
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want to be good.’ (Well actually, I remember I thought ‘nice’. But I meant
‘good’.) And I became a born-again Aristotelian and set about trying to develop
most especially charity (particularly with respect to using my clever tongue to
say kind things rather than cruel ones.) I was still many years off becoming a
virtue ethicist, but, prompted by Foot’s paper (I suppose) I had thought “I want
to be nice/good” not “I want to do the right thing” and my educational
background –Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot, etc. my parents’ and
their friends’ constant quoting of the King James Bible had made much of the
traditional virtue vocabulary entirely familiar to me.
But this very fact – that I could curb my tongue by thinking ‘Now Rosalind, is
that kind ,’ and stall my impulse to cut a male fellow graduate down to size by
thinking ‘Be charitable –he’s probably just showing off what he’s read because
I’ve just been chatting to Anscombe and calling her Elizabeth and he thinks I’m
part of an elite inner circle, not that I’m the ignoramus I am’ – the fact that
much of the virtue vocabulary, in its traditional sense, was quite natural to me,
was, I have realised only recently, not as unremarkable a fact as I took it to be
at the time.
The realisation has come from reading a fascinating paper by Sophia Vasalou
called ‘Educating Virtue as a Mastery of Language’. It is a very subtle and
complex paper which I cannot possibly summarise with justice, so I’ll just
concentrate on the aspect that fascinated me.
To put in its proper setting, I’ll tell you straight off that Vasalou is firmly on my
side – that is, she believes that by and large – hos epi to pollu – we need to use
the explicit language of the virtues to accomplish moral self-improvement. But
she sees a difficulty about this which I now realise I have dimly apprehended
during my last decade of teaching the Aristotle class, but never recognised
clearly before. In brief, she claims that the use of the traditional virtue
language, in everyday ethical reflection on everyday scenarios – surely the
meat and drink of moral improvement – is manifestly inappropriate, artificial,
unnatural, out of place. Not of course in the lives of people like us, but as
academics, we’re in a minority group and as academics who know about virtue
ethics in a teensy weensy mini-minority one. And we need to be aware of that
fact.
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She illustrates this inappropriateness through her discussion of a very nice
example I’ll give in full.
Imagine, then, you are at your family home and one of your
distant relatives is visiting; disagreeable aunts and uncles
abounding in the world of extended families, this is someone
you have little desire to engage with, and would prefer to
unload the entire burden of entertaining her (call it a her) to
the culpable member of your family who had the misconceived
idea of inviting· her. This is also a time, as it happens, when you
have just started work on an exciting new project. This being the
beginning of summer and the start of true intellectual otium, all
you can think of is to pick up your cup of morning coffee and
set down straight to work. You stop by the kitchen and it should
be just your luck that you find her sitting at the kitchen table
with a cup of coffee in front of her, looking up to give you that
sweet, dull smile of hers upon your entry. You flinch with
annoyance. Might a quick getaway still be possible, you wonder,
while your aunt continues to smile sweetly? A sense of guilt
has already crept into your animosity. Dash it all, you realise
she is a gentle and good-natured type overall, though you have
always found her unbearably dull. You know, too, that it is all for
the best that someone has the idea of inviting aunts and uncles
over once in a while, otherwise you would have a family only in
name. And what are families about if not about having
relationships with people you do not personally feel you have
much in common? Reproaching yourself for your ill temper,
you say to yourself, "You shouldn't be like that. In these
circumstances, you should be-" And now you pause: what is
that word for which you are reaching in order to describe the
attitude called for in this situation?
She then considers an array of possible answers she might give in which she
identifies the moral weakness she might think she was betraying -‘You should
be more philosophical, patient, tolerant, forbearing flexible …’and lots more
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but notes that the scenario ‘would be especially likely to flag one key trait of
character found in all the traditional handbooks of the virtues’ namely a
deficiency in benevolence or kindness. And surveying this array of terms, she
finds a difference. She finds an admonition to be philosophical, or patient, or
tolerant etc to seem ‘perfectly in order and intelligible as a command one
might give to oneself or to others’ (p.69) but that this is not so with the term
benevolence.
It, she says, ‘trails certain additional implications which get in the way of its
appropriateness’ (p. 70 )which she identifies as its having a ‘certain additional
heaviness or force’ (p.71). She has said earlier that it would embarrass her to
say to herself, standing in the doorway ‘You should be more benevolent’, and
having got the heaviness point, she thinks she can now say why –‘I would
experience the inappropriateness of the term as an excess of grandeur and of a
burdensome gravitas, which I could ill afford to step into without seeming
absurd.’ (p.71) The grandeur brings with it a kind of piety that we tend to
mock. ‘A word like this is decidedly not a word I am capable of using in a
command to myself to make small talk with my aunt or cousin sitting a trace
dully in the kitchen without laying myself open to laughter.’(72)
She says one might think that the inappropriateness that the term
benevolence seems to bring to the envisaged scenario was simply the result of
its now carrying associations it didn’t have in Hume or even Mill’s day, just as
the old virtue term ‘charity’ has connotations it didn’t have at the time of the
King James Bible. As she notes, the latter now ‘carries the twin burdens of a
Christian legacy as well as the associations derived from a certain kind of
philanthropic activity implying an unequal relation between giver and
receiver.’ (p.72) (My colleague Glen Pettigrove tells me that this was true of
the term even in Hume’s day and that’s why he uses benevolence rather than
charity as most modern ethicists do to this day.) And outside moral philosophy,
the description ‘benevolent’ is now largely restricted to Father Christmas and
smiles; it’s not really used as a virtue term any more.
But she doesn’t think that that is the answer, because she goes on to envisage
admonishing herself at the doorway, ‘in these circumstances you should be
kind ‘. Now kindness, unlike benevolence and charity, is still operating just fine
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as part of everyday moral discourse, and moreover as a virtue term (as much
as any do nowadays) but she finds its use in her scenario just as embarrassing,
just as inappropriate, as she found the use of the term benevolent, and for just
the same reason –its ‘excess gravity’ in its application to ‘the relatively short
stature or insignificance of the situation at issue.’ (p.72. Describing pausing at
the doorway to ‘exchange a few words of good morning, even to sit down and
share a quick morning chat with a visiting relative who is sitting idly in the
kitchen without (and here is the clincher) giving sign of the least bit of misery’
–describing such a small event as an act of kindness (either to myself or to
commend it in someone else)just seems over the top.
I shall be interested to hear your reaction to those claims but I thought that, as
claims about ordinary everyday moral vocabulary they are absolutely right.
And they highlighted what I have often sensed as odd in the things I say to the
students in my Aristotle ethics class using these terms. I have quite often felt
compelled to say to them ’I sound like a Victorian preacher don’t I’, when I’m
talking about benevolence-or-charity, and (of course) ‘temperance’. And I can
see that they are somewhat relieved by this confession but still rather
uncomfortable about the fact that I’m doing so. Or, having given as an example
of, say, a kind act, something similar to Vasalou’s (rather than what the
students nearly ALWAYS some up with, namely giving to a beggar) and sensed
that somehow it hasn’t quite worked, I have, again quite often told them about
Catholic children being taught to write the latin phrase for ‘to the greater
glory of god’ at the top of all their school work, to remind them that even that
mundane activity could be done in order to give glory to God, or, as
Aistot6elians would put it, could be done in accordance with virtue – and been
conscious of the fact that that hasn’t worked either. And now I see part of the
reason why. I’m giving a third year philosophy lecture and I sound
inappropriately, embarrassingly, ridiculously pious because most of the people
in the class just don’t use these heavyweight words. And if and when they do,
they reserve their use to describe rather more morally significant actions – the
sort perhaps that Foot characterised as those in which virtue is severely tested
and comes through. I think my students would readily accept my describing
Vasalou’s sitting down to talk pleasantly to her rude male chauvinist manifestly
lonely uncle as kind, but not the scenario she describes.
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Her third example is the term courage in relation to an example most of us will
remember: we are about to give our first paper ever, and it’s at our first big
conference ever and we are terrified. She uses this to illustrate the claim that
the term courage is like benevolence,charity and kindness in the following two
respects (a) that identifying a personal deficiency in that virtue as what one is
manifesting in a mundane situation like this is often just what one needs to do
with a view to moral self improvement but (b) the use of ‘I should be more
courageous’ or ‘Rosalind don’t be so cowardly’ in that situation is, again, in
ordinary usage, unnatural, inappropriate, artificial, ‘cannot’ be done.
She thinks that, as before, the inappropriateness etc arises from the ‘additional
implications’ of the term in ordinary language, amongst which is the
implication that ‘a courageous act serves the good of those for the sake of
whom one masters one’s fears’. I’m not sure whether she wants to say that
this gives the term courage the heaviness,weight,grandeur etc which make the
others inappropriate, but I’m inclined to think it does, though a different sort.
If I bang on about being kind or benevolent in making small talk to my aunt I
sound ridiculously pious; if I bang on about being courageous re giving a good
delivery of my paper I sound deplorably pretentious and self congratulatory –
how can she describe herself as aspiring to do something courageous when it’s
just something for her own benefit!
Now granted, that’s only four examples, only two of which moreover are on
the Virtues Project’s list of 52, (though it also has ‘love’ which stands in for
charity I’d say) but, as I said, it did, I thought, clarify a difficulty I had been
conscious of, and thereby gave me most furiously to think.
But having thought about it while writing this paper, and looking back at
Vasalou’s scenario, I’m not sure she has put her finger exactly on the problem.
She is assuming that anyone morally serious, thinking in ordinary everyday
terms might well consider the set up her way –that is by considering whether
the situation called for her to be more stoical, philosophical, patient,
forbearing, tolerant, flexible, adaptable, mature, self-denying, gentler, … All
this character trait vocabulary is fine she thinks, – it’s just the terms
benevolent, charitable, kind and courageous which are odd and thereby
problematic.
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But now when I imagine some of my students at the beginning of my course in
that scenario, it doesn’t seem likely to me that they are going to find it natural
to think in Vasalou’s first set of terms either. Of course not all the students
would count as ‘morally serious’ and fit into the scenario at all. No doubt the
biggest difficulty regarding moral self-development is motivating people to aim
to be good people, but that’s not my worry in this paper. Quite a few students
enrol in my class because, rather vaguely, or in some more specific way, they
really do have that aim, and have heard that it’s an inspirational course in
which I exhort them to do so. My worry stems from the fact that I’m pretty
sure that most of them think of ‘being a good person’ simply as Doing Good
capital letters.
So I’m not thinking about the unmotivated students, nor am I imagining that
my motivated students won’t think in these other terms because they are
somewhat “bookish” (ref) though most of them are. It seems to me that they
won’t think in these terms because, quite simply, their thoughts aren’t going to
start with Vasalou’s response to her sense of guilt. They are not going to start
by reproaching themselves for being such and such, and telling themselves
they should be so and so instead, as she does. They’re going to start by
reproaching themselves for what they had been intending to do, namely make
a quick getaway. ‘You shouldn’t do that ..’ they will say to themselves ‘It’s not
right. You should sit down and make friendly noises.’ That’s obviously the right
thing to do and, wanting to be good people, of course they want to do the right
thing.
And that that’s the way their thoughts (I’m pretty sure) would go, makes a big
difference, not only because, ex hypothesi, it doesn’t call for any reflection –
it’s just obvious – but more importantly because it doesn’t involve any selfsearching, any attempt to identify in oneself ‘the particular moral weakness’
which prompted the thought of the quick getaway and prevented sitting down
and making friendly noises being one’s easy and unhesitating reaction to that
sweet dull smile.
So what I see as the problem that Vasalou hasn’t quite got is that nowadays
young people who, as I did, have realised that they want to be good, are
significantly unlike me all those years ago. They don’t think of being a good
person as having the virtuous character traits and thereby of becoming a good
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person as developing these. They think of being or becoming good as being or
becoming someone who has a certain sort of job or occupation.
So they think of being a good person as being a doctor, or a psychotherapist or
the sort of lawyer that specialises in defending the underdog or, like most of
the students in my friend’s graduate class on human rights in the sociology
department, of returning to their own country to go into politics or campaign
for the rights of the persecuted or teach in the villages or work in refugee
camps. Wanting to be good people, they want to be the sort of people who
help others and make the world a better place, who do that sort of thing.
Splendid! one might say. But as far as I –and my friend – can see, it just hasn’t
occurred to them that being an effective doctor, lawyer, therapist, politician,
campaigner, village teacher etc. actually helping people and making the world
a better place, might require rather more than acquiring the relevant
qualifications. It’s as though they think that they already have the inner
resources to Do Good all the time – all that is lacking is the opportunity, which
the morally significant job will provide. (Of course they don’t actually think
that, because, again, they haven’t thought of any inner resources (beyond their
good intentions) as having to come into it at all.) So, going back to Vasalou’s
list, I don’t think it has occurred to them that, unless they can make
themselves more patient, or tolerant or forbearing, or gentler or flexible or ….
they’re almost bound to do a rotten job.
So I think the difficulty, by and large, with getting even motivated young
people to think the right way about moral self development is getting them to
think about moral self-development at all. It’s not that they’re particularly
smug and self-satisfied; it’s rather that- as an aspect of their virtuous idealism
perhaps- they are all focussed on the evils of the world and what can be done
about them; they assume, albeit unconsciously, that this is what serious
ethics/morality is about. We’re right back to never mind about Being, Doing is
what matters.
There is another point in Vasalou’s paper that comes in here. Remember when
I described her position I said it was that in everyday ethical reflection on
everyday scenarios the heavyweight virtue term vocabulary was manifestly
inappropriate, artificial, unnatural, out of place. And I added in passing that
such everyday ethical reflection was surely the meat and drink of moral selfdevelopment, agreeing with Vasalou’s saying (p.72) that ‘There is no scenario
that is so mundane that it may not express and conversely train (moral)
character.’ Near the end of her paper, speaking of the heavyweight terms, and
on the assumption that their use, inappropriate and artificial as it may be
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nowadays, may well be what is needed for moral self-development, she notes
that what would have to be recognised is that ‘big words (the heavyweight
ones) may be needed for small events’ (the first scenario).’ And I think a
slightly amended version of that is right.
It is because, as a virtue ethicist, she naturally thinks of actions – mundane or
not - in terms of their expressing or training character that she imagines the
response she does in her mundane scenario. But if, like my students, you are
thinking of Doing Good capital letters, or righting the evils in the world, you are
thinking of actions that are very significantly morally right or wrong, - as
having, in Vasalou’s perceptive terminology, a certain degree of grandeur and
gravitas - and a lot of your everyday mundane actions are just going to be
under your radar. Monitoring oneself throughout the day as to whether or not
one is Doing Good in mundane situations would seem inappropriate, artificial,
unnatural. After all, it’s quite obvious that one isn’t which is just why the
students are burning to start on that morally significant job and get away from
the trivia of the life they are living now.
We may recognise many of their mundane actions as quite possibly expressing
or shaping character, but, again, that’s because it’s the way we think. But for
my students, unless some real twinge of guilt prompts them to recognise that
they have done or are about to do, something definitely wrong, they won’t, in
the relevant sense, think about what they are doing day to day at all. And even
if a twinge does make them think, it won’t, I claimed above, necessarily lead
any one of them to reflect “What flaw in me prompted me not to do the right
thing here?” or “Do I make this kind of little mistake often? Hmmm” that is,
not to any self-reflexion at all.
So my current view is that what my students need to recognise is not so much
that ‘big words may be needed for small events’ as that, unbeknownst to
them, their characters are being formed, for well or ill, in those small events
that constitute their everyday actions. So they call for serious attention.
(Maybe our catchphrase should be ‘mighty oaks from little acorns grow.’)
But without the vocabulary of the character trait words to hand, they won’t
have the means to interrogate their actions sources at hand, even if they do
give the actions serious attention. So, as I said at the outset, at the moment I
am thinking rather gloomily that this vocabulary will have to be made much
more familiar, and the practical question is how. Of course the Virtues Project,
properly implemented, would be the ideal method, but Darcia’s idea of
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‘chronic priming’i at school, if I have understood it correctly, sounds to me as
though it might at least be a great help.
i
“when students are in classrooms where p[osters with words such as ‘courage’ and ‘honesty’ are pri9minently
place don the walls, the students are being chronhically primsed over relatively long perdios - weeks or
months – with the names of those virtue.”
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